Brands continue to push for transparency in 2018 and some are no longer relying on partners, but building the tech themselves
Avanish Kausick’s Latest Post
January 8th Story of the Day
Frito-Lay, from Intern to CMO in 12 Years: Jennifer Saenz
Frito-Lay CMO Jennifer Saenz says listening to consumers is a top priority if you want to build marketing experiences that drive engagement.
January 7th Story of the Day
When scientists started linking cigarettes to cancer, the tobacco industry silenced them—only acknowledging the extent of the truth decades later, under legal duress.
Imagine if, instead, they had given these researchers license to publish papers, or even taken the information to heart and crippled their own money-making machines for the good of their addicted users.
No one has accused Facebook FB 1.37% of causing cancer, but Mark Zuckerberg now stands at a similar crossroads.
In the face of pressure brought by a growing roster of Facebook Inc. investors and former executives, many of whom have publicly stated that Facebook is both psychologically addictive and harmful to democracy, the Facebook founder and chief executive has pledged to “fix” Facebook, by doing a number of things including “making sure that time spent on Facebook is time well spent.”
Mr. Zuckerberg has also recently told investors he wants his company “to encourage meaningful social interactions,” adding that “time spent is not a goal by itself.”
Facebook researchers have acknowledged that while direct sharing between individuals and small groups on Facebook can have positive effects, merely scrolling through others’ updates makes people unhappy. PHOTO:ISTOCK
So here’s the multibillion-dollar question: Is Mr. Zuckerberg willing to sacrifice revenue for the well-being of Facebook’s two billion-plus users?
Mr. Zuckerberg has already said the company will hire so many content moderators to deal with fake news and Russian interference that it will hurt profits, but whether he will go further and change the basic fabric of Facebook’s algorithms in the name of users’ mental health, he has yet to say.
Clearly, Facebook, a company Mr. Zuckerberg started when he was in college, has changed so much that even its creator is playing catch-up to the reality of its globe-spanning power.
In June he changed the company’s mission from “connecting” the world to bringing the world closer together. He said he used to think giving people a voice would make the world better on its own, “but our society is still divided. Now I believe we have a responsibility to do even more.”
In December, Facebook researchers surveyed the scientific literature and their own workand publicly acknowledged that while direct communication and sharing between individuals and small groups on Facebook can have positive effects, merely lurking and scrolling through others’ broadcasted status updates makes people unhappy.
In a survey conducted in early 2017, the Royal Society for Public Health asked 1,500 young people to evaluate the five biggest social networks, to measure whether they are good or bad for mental health. The results showed all but one service had a negative effect on mental health. Facebook, Twitter , Snapchat and the Facebook-owned Instagram all pushed survey participants to contrast their lives with others, a phenomenon known as social comparison. The exception was YouTube, in part because the dynamic is usually one-to-many communication, with person-to-person socializing happening in comments.
January 4th Story of the Day
The Role of Humans in Artificial Intelligence:
Fascinated as I am by the potential for machines and humans to drive human progress forward, I am not an AI expert, but follow closely many of the developments on the topic that appear in our “media funnels” everyday.
There are quite a few people, very smart people, having very public discussions about the potential for AI to overtake humans. Ray Kurzweil, one of the world’s greatest thinkers, wrote about the coming of The Singularity, in his 2005 book.
Elon Musk, has warned of an unregulated AI being a bigger threat than N. Korea, although Gates and Zuckerberg disagree
In reading this NYT story about AI-Research being done out of Stanford, what struck me as significant was the amount of human-involvement required to classify the 50 million images gathered from Google Street View.
“But first, a database curated by humans had to train the A.I. software to understand the images”, according to study lead, Timnit Gebru, who now works for Microsoft Research.
The Stanford Researchers recruited “hundreds of people to pick out and classify cars in a sample of millions of pictures.” Once the machines knew what vehicles they were looking at, they could flex their binary-muscles and work much faster than the team of people.
This is but one example of how machines & people can work together to drive our society forward…and I cannot help but wonder if the machines do start to misbehave, can we not just hit the off switch or pull the plug?
Scott Turner
Pam Codispoti – the woman who created Sapphire Reserve
RedPoint Global CEO Dale Renner
a quick profile of the CEO and to whom he credits his success
The future of media currencies in Europe
January 3rd Story of the Day
How Unilever is fighting back against “ankle biter” brands globally.
Can Breyers beat Halo Top for healthy ice cream dominance?